Clean eating recipe: Sweet potato hummus

I previously posted about my intentions to start a cleaner eating diet and the first step towards this was making my own peanut butter. It actually worked out quite well, you can definitely taste a difference (it’s less sweet) but just as good! The next recipe I wanted to make was sweet potato hummus, again using Skinny Ms’ recipe, although I tweaked it some to suit my own needs.

The main thing I liked most about this is how simple it is to make. Just stick all the ingredients in a blender/food processor until everything is well combined and it’s ready to serve! The only thing that took me longer was preparing my own chick peas. You’re probably easiest to buy a tin of them from the shop, but I wanted to know exactly what goes into most of my ingredients, so decided to try it my way.

I bought dried ones in a bag and because the recipe called for ready to cook chick peas, I ended up preparing too many, but it means I’ve got plenty of chick peas now to try out the other recipes! To give you an idea, I weighed about 580g dried chick peas and ended up using about a quarter of them prepared, so if you plan to prepare your own chick peas I’d say you’ll need only about 125g of the dried peas.

You’ll need to first soak them overnight in a cool place (I left my bowl in the fridge), then hard boil them for about 10 minutes before leaving it on a slow simmer for another 2 hours or so until it’s soft. The next step is removing the skin from the peas: the quick way is to run the peas under cold running water and gently sift your hands through the peas, rubbing them gently and changing the water every so often, but I decided to be more meticulous and remove each skin individually.

After removing all the skins, I measured out the amount of chick peas I’d need for my hummus and put the rest in tupperware containers and put this in the freezer.

I didn’t have a fresh lemon, but we have a bottle of lemon juice so I used this instead. We had large cloves of garlic so I used one of these instead of 5 cloves as the recipe originally asked for.

1. Steam or slow cook the sweet potatoes until soft. I stuck my potatoes in the oven with a bit of oil.

2. Transfer cooked sweet potatoes to a food processor and blend until smooth. Slowly add chick peas in small quantities to allow the peas to blend with the potatoes.

I learned the hard way that blending the chick peas first meant the sweet potatoes couldn’t get to the blades

3. Add lemon juice, Tahini, garlic, salt and about 2 tbsp of water to start with.

Pulse the mixture until smooth, scraping down the sides of bowl and adding water to thin mixture if it seems too thick.

4. Once everything is well blended, spoon out a little to taste.

The hummus I made had a slight sweet taste from the sweet potato, but I think I could have added more. I put in one sweet potato in the hummus, but I think I’ll cook a bit more next time. It does have a bit of a kick to it from the fresh garlic though which is quite nice! We ended up with quite a lot so tried to give some to friends and family so it didn’t go to waste.

Like regular store bought hummus, it doesn’t keep long so you should try and use it within 5-6 days of making it.

Let me know if you’ve tried this recipe and how you got on! Did you add/remove any ingredients or swap it with an alternative?